The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)

by Evelyn Skye

Her father scarcely pretended to smile. “Even Yakov Zinchenko wasn’t powerful enough to steal magic from so far away. And magic is loyal to its countrymen, for it is those very countrymen whose belief sows it. Morocco’s magic wouldn’t answer to a Russian.” The kitchen grew colder. Vika hugged her arms around herself. But why did death on the journey to becoming Imperial Enchanter shock her? Her father had warned her, hadn’t he? There had even been a lesson when Vika was younger—a horrible lesson—in which he’d asked her to resurrect a stillborn wolverine pup. Vika had clenched her fists and gritted her teeth and mustered all the power she had to focus on the pup’s heart, trying to feel if there were anything broken inside, anything she could move back together. She’d checked its muscles, its lungs, its stomach, liver, and every other organ, only to be met with silence. It turned out that had been the entire purpose of Sergei’s lesson: to show her that death was real, and an inescapable part of the Imperial Enchanter’s job. So it should be no great revelation that dancing with death—defying death—could be part of the Imperial Enchanter’s initiation. Vika packed the clay from the former pitcher in her hands. It hardened into a ceramic cannonball. “I don’t fancy dying.” Her father emptied the bottle of kvass. “Then the only option is, you cannot lose.”